Going Nowhere Fast

Math isn't like english or history. Money comes in and money goes out. Hopefully the out is less than the in. At least that's the way my finances are supposed to work since I can't just print money when I need it.

Budget Plan Assumes Too Much, Demands Too Little: "The president's budget acknowledges the cost of Bush's call to make his tax cuts permanent -- $1.35 trillion over the next decade and nearly $120 billion in 2011 alone. But beyond 2007, the budget assumes no military expenditures in Iraq or Afghanistan and no effort to address the unintended effects of the alternative minimum tax, a parallel income tax system that was designed to hit the rich but has instead increasingly pinched the middle class. It also assumes Congress will cut domestic spending every year after 2007.

Those factors led Goldman Sachs economists to tell clients yesterday that the deficit forecasts are 'unrealistic.'

White House Budget Director Joshua B. Bolten said that something must be done about the AMT. But beyond 2007, when Bush assumes a one-year provision to mitigate the AMT's impact on the middle class, Bolten said any fix should be part of a broader 'revenue-neutral' restructuring of the tax system. Such a revision, once viewed as a priority of the president's, has disappeared from Bush's political agenda."

Of course it has. His new plan is we sow, he reaps.

"This budget is not going to happen," said Stanley E. Collender, a federal budget analyst at Financial Dynamics Business Communications. "Of all the budgets I've seen recently, this is the one going nowhere the fastest."

What is included may prove equally unrealistic, Collender and other budget experts said. The budget includes a crackdown on tax cheats that is supposed to net more than $1.5 billion over the next five years and $3.6 billion over the next decade. But if such a crackdown is in the offing, the Internal Revenue Service has said very little about it.

They will come in the dark of the night, knock on your door and take you off to debtor's prison.

After a difficult political struggle that badly divided congressional Republicans, lawmakers muscled through savings from Medicaid and the State Children's Health Insurance Program, federal child support enforcement and the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. Before Bush has even signed that legislation, he is coming back for more. His budget proposes to wring out $4.9 billion more in savings from Medicaid and the State Children's Health Insurance Program, $17 million from child support enforcement and $16.7 billion from the federal pension insurance program through 2011.

Douglas Holtz-Eakin, the recently retired director of the Congressional Budget Office, gave credit to Bush for putting entitlement cuts on the table. But the problems with the budget -- especially in not confronting the effects of the AMT and the war in Iraq -- have cropped up time and again, Holtz-Eakin said.

Make sure that those parents who don't want to pay for their children now don't have to while at the same time reducing any benefit that the supporting parent might receive to help make the difference. Nice. Only to be followed by the equally brilliant and poorly timed reduction to the pension insurance program as so many of the companies proceed to bail on their obligations to their employees and leave a generation of older people without any support, through no fault of their own. Double nice.

Compassionate conservatism at it's best. Proud to be an Amurican.

Tags: budget, compassionate conservatism, stupid ideas,